The Canadian government’s pilot program to buy civilian guns was a flop. Now multiple provinces are refusing to implement the Liberal government’s nationwide confiscation of guns.
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On Tuesday the government of Newfoundland announced that it will refuse to participate in the federal “assault-style firearms” buyback program that other provinces have already plopped out of. The province’s Conservative premier, Tony Wakeham, called on the federal government to “re-allocate the resources allotted for this program toward reducing crime, drug-related violence and repeat offenders.” The federal government has allocated around $250 million to compensating owners of newly banned weapons that happen to be designed in an especially ominous or intimidating “style” — remember, that’s their word! — and it foresees that this amount is enough to scoop up 136,000 evil-looking guns.
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This now means that half the provinces, along with two of the three territorial governments, have declined to participate in the buyback: only Quebec, British Columbia, the Maritimes and Nunavut are left. (It’s an illuminating constitutional point that Yukon and the Northwest Territories are capable of refusing to have their police collect guns condemned for their appearance; one would have thought that the territories are creatures of the federation in ways that the provinces aren’t.) From one point of view, this is an inconvenience for those Canadians in the dissenting zones who would like to get a few hundred dollars for a weapon that is no longer legal to own. But it does hopefully mean that the cost of the whole boondoggle, being confined to regions with 40 per cent of the Dominion’s population, has a natural upper bound.
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After all, the brief pilot in Cape Breton for the buyback project, as you’ll recall, was forecast to retrieve 200 prohibited guns; when it yielded a mere 16, it was declared a resounding success by the federal Public Safety department. The floundering minister, Gary Anandasangaree, was quoted at the time as saying that the pilot hadn’t been about reaching “quantitative” targets. . . .
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